Ana Muñiz, an assistant professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine who worked on the Rodriguez case, said injunctions grew out of “white panic over the crack epidemic and the war on drugs” of the 1980s and early 1990s. In the years that followed, Muñiz said, such policies unfairly targeted countless young African Americans and Latinos who were not affiliated with any kind of criminal organization, for simply being outside in public spaces.

“Gang injunctions are about racial profiling. They’re about confining — particularly people of color, particularly Black men — to certain parts of the city,” she said, likening them to vagrancy laws passed after the abolition of slavery that tightly restricted free movement for recently freed Black people. “We replace the explicit reference to Black men with the coded language of going after gang members.”

For the full story, please visit https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-12-13/30-million-gang-curfew-settlement-late-payments.